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Geoffrey Farmer: A Light in the Moon, at Mercer Union

Farmer’s new work at Mercer Union addresses the weight of history and its tendency to vanish from view

A detail of Geoffrey Farmer's Boneyard, a new work commissioned by Toronto's Mercer Union. Farmer, who won the Iskowitz Prize at the AGO this year, will have a major solo show at the gallery in 2014. (Toni Hafkenscheid photo)

A detail of Geoffrey Farmer's Boneyard, a new work commissioned by Toronto's Mercer Union. Farmer, who won the Iskowitz Prize at the AGO this year, will have a major solo show at the gallery in 2014. (Toni Hafkenscheid Photo)

A wider view of Geoffrey Farmer's Boneyard, a new work commissioned by Toronto's Mercer Union. Farmer, who won the Iskowitz Prize at the AGO this year, will have a major solo show at the gallery in 2014. (Toni Hafkenscheid photo)

Vancouver artist Geoffrey Farmer is being touted as Canada's next representative at the Venice Biennale in 2015.

The weight of history hangs heavy over A Light In The Moon, the arresting, sombre, beguiling and, in spurts, uproariously funny exhibition crafted by world-famous Vancouver artist Geoffrey Farmer. It’s strong testament to the artist’s unique gift for crafting transformative, lasting experience from mountains of ephemera; A Light in the Moon carries heavy freight but is also light as air.

On a huge, round plinth that occupies a good half of the floor space of the main gallery at Mercer Union sits Boneyard, Farmer’s main event here and the piece commissioned by the gallery itself. That it evokes nothing so much as a stage is no accident. On it are hundreds of sculptural figures of varying sizes, from classical Greek and Roman to Giacometti’s nubbly sentinels to sleek, Modern Brancusis and rough-and-tumble Picassos.

Each is a cut-out photograph from one art history book or another, which Farmer has braced with wooden backing and propped up in his elaborate mise-en-scène. All face outward, their backs to a central fluted column, which looms above — a rallying point maybe or just a way for Farmer to mark a knowable centre amid the swirl.

Farmer might feel as though he could do with a little anchoring himself. It’s been a busy couple of years. Last summer, he was among the big hits in documenta (13), the once-in-five-years art exhibition in Kassel, Germany, that’s seen as the pinnacle of international contemporary art. Since then, he’s shown in London, Zurich, Naples and Berlin, to list a few. All this adds up to Farmer being one of Canada’s best-known art exports: a veritable rock star, ready and waiting for his stadium tour. He won’t wait long: talk of him being the next artist chosen to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale in 2015 won’t go away.

In June, Farmer won the $50,000 Gershon Iskowitz Prize at the Art Gallery of Ontario, which inlcudes a solo show at the museum, loosely slated for next spring.

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So you can think of A Light in the Moon as something of a preview. The breadth of Farmer’s interests and material curiosities make his practice endlessly fresh and surprising, but you can connect some dots. Boneyard has strong ties to Leaves of Grass, his much-loved work for documenta (13).

For it, he meticulously clipped hundreds of images from 50 years of Life magazine, then fixed them to flexible supports, so that the entire installation would shiver and quake with the faintest breeze. There was something being said about time: both its relentless churn and our insignificance within it. Then again, significance is a slippery notion itself, no less fleeting than those who determine it.

Boneyard gathers up these ideas and seems to apply them straight-forwardly to the more eggheaded realm of art history (its source material came during a residency at Queen’s University in 2011, when professor and fellow artist Ted Rettig redirected deaccessioned art books from the Queen’s library Farmer’s way).

Look a little more closely, though. A numbered text leads you through; a handful identify canonic pieces, but most dive deep into gleeful absurdity. A cluster of tiny classical figures are described as follows: “The wearing of clothes is exclusively a human characteristic and is a feature of most human societies. It is not known when humans began to wear clothes.” What appears to be a Christ figure exhorting a disciple is titled thusly: Please Sir, I have asked you politely would you please leave now or I will call security.

This is uproarious but serious fun. Farmer has unpacked a storehouse of catalogued cultural significance and has turned it loose in the painfully real world of constant noise and virtual chatter. Add in that these are pictures and they destabilize further: ghosts of ghosts, bearing the likeness of real things with substance in a world so many of us gave up knowing in favour of Googling.

Farmer’s guide is a riot, but more than that, a fair approximation of the voice in our heads that struggles to grasp meaning from images and ideas that fly by in a torrent of information that accelerates daily. His suggestion — how much can be known, in a world exploding with it and so much of it wrong? — underpins the good humour with what is, really, the dilemma of our times.

It is, after all, a boneyard, a reliquary of the known, unknown and vaguely recalled, yanked from the dustbin of history and reanimated for one last dance. Meanwhile, the winds of change ever blow and, like the song said, we know what wind does to dust.

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